Shameful direct provision conditions should keep our leaders off high horse on racism
RACISM can be overt – like a knee on another human being’s neck. Or insidious – like corralling people with few choices in life into shoddy, ill-equipped direct provision centres and shrugging off complaints with words to the effect that nobody forced them to come here. Leadership can be nominal – like winning an election but doing little or nothing to lead. Or inspirational – like becoming a force for healing, unity and progress.
Let’s consider racism and leadership, and how they relate to Ireland. Around the world, the public is looking on in horror at the US, where some Americans are locked into a perpetual refusal to accept blacks as equal human beings.
Now, naturally we’re ready to mount our high horses. Tolerate systemic racial inequality? We’d never put up with that. Oh, wait – there’s our reluctance to accept asylum seekers as equal human beings.
That high-horse position looks wobbly when we cast an eye over the institutions where asylum seekers are sent.
Family life is stifled in them. While a number of centres have cooking facilities, most operate canteens widely criticised for food quality and a failure to take on board specific dietary needs.
The high horse becomes even more unstable when we reflect how there are children here, born into direct provision, who know no different way of life. Some people languish here in limbo for years.
Toni Morrison, in a tribute to her writer friend James Baldwin, the voice of the US civil rights movement, said he threw down a challenge to “stand on moral ground but know that ground must be shored up by mercy”.
Where’s the mercy in direct provision? The Taoiseach reminds us that “it is not compulsory. It’s not a form of detention and involves people being provided with free accommodation, food, heating, lighting, healthcare, education and also some spending money”.
This is a brag? We’re not detaining people, we’re not using tents or internment camps? That’s a strained sort of mercy.
In fact, arrangements regarding asylum seekers are so remote from any acknowledgment of our common humanity, so lacking in respect, empathy and decency, that they shame us. The Taoiseach admits facilities are “substandard” in some centres, and suggests efforts will be made to do better in future.
Who’s been running the State for the past three years? Leo Varadkar had the power to overhaul the direct provision format. Some improvements have happened, such as increasing a minuscule pocket money payment to the modest weekly sum of €38.80 per adult and €29.80 per child. But major reform of the system is needed, not tweaks.
Labour’s Alan Kelly showed leadership in drawing an analogy between direct provision and the brutal racism of the US – where a police officer knelt on the neck of an unarmed black man, arrested on suspicion of passing a counterfeit $20 bill.
Mr Kelly said it wasn’t necessary to look far to see how direct provision was “the real discrimination, the real racism” in Ireland – a system that is not humane.
Mr Varadkar rejected the analogy. But just because a knee isn’t pressing on someone’s neck doesn’t mean they are being treated with justice.
Direct provision was introduced as an emergency measure in 1999 and we’re still using it. The majority of centres are privately owned and standards vary. As asylum seekers have pointed out, they are treated worse than people tried and convicted under the criminal justice system.
Denying them access to the Pandemic Unemployment Payment is one more example of the two-tier system. But we’re not racist. Not us. No, sir.
Let’s think about common humanity. Baldwin, Jimmy to his friends, grew up before there was a civil rights movement in the US, and wrote about it in novels, essays, journalism and poetry.
His unfinished manuscript was turned into an Oscar-nominated documentary, ‘I Am Not Your Negro’, narrated by Samuel L Jackson. If you could condense a lifetime’s work into two words, they would be ‘dream bigger’.
What’s playing out in the US currently is evidence of shrinkage – dreams are dwindling in size rather than growing. But they aren’t exactly plumping up here.
Where are the big dreams for, with and about asylum seekers? The recognition of their cultural capital, the skills they can share? We barely treat them as members of the same species.
Lockdown has been tough on many, but it is a deeply unpleasant experience for the people who landed on these shores in hopes of improving their circumstances.
Like countless Irish people who emigrated to the US and elsewhere for precisely the same reason.
Leadership is needed in the world as never before. It has been forthcoming from President Obama rather than President Trump – President Obama has urged specific reforms and remarked positively on the “representative cross-section” and “broad coalition” of people demonstrating in cities across the US.
And Trump? He called for harsher measures to deter protesters and boasted on social media about the “domination” and “overwhelming force” that cleared the streets. He posted inflammatory tweets about “lowlife & scum”, called the cities a “battlespace” and used a church as a prop for a photo opportunity, Bible in hand.
“He thinks division helps him,” said would-be Democratic nominee Joe Biden. And he is busy sowing it. But there is potential for division closer to home, too.
In Ireland, it is four months since the people had their say and the February 8 vote continues to be ignored. The Covid-19 crisis may have modified the electorate’s impatience with self-obsessed and personally ambitious politicians who are foot-dragging about government formation, but it will bubble up sooner or later.
During a once-in-a-generation emergency, it’s unacceptable for government formation talks to stutter along, every party for themselves. The heads of Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Greens have scheduled a troubleshooting meeting this weekend to find a way forward. But the national interest is limping in the dust behind party interest.
Enormous economic challenges lie ahead with long-term consequences – for example, we know prolonged periods of unemployment cause human misery.
And the UK is on the brink of a no-deal Brexit. It has three more weeks to ask for an extension to the transition period, but the Boris Johnson administration is not making noises compatible with extension requests. Negotiations are happening by video conferencing rather than face to face, which means the chances of accommodation look slimmer than ever.
Here’s an example of leadership: Bobby Kennedy’s speech delivered a few hours after Martin Luther King’s death in 1968. Racial tensions were enflamed, but he dampened them by talking about how a white man had killed his brother, too, and spoke of an ideal advanced by the ancient Greeks “to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world”.
Leadership is about leading people to those mountaintop moments where grace and understanding can be achieved. Not everyone is capable of being a leader – but those who lack that capacity should vacate the building.
As asylum seekers have pointed out, they are treated worse than people tried and convicted under the criminal justice system